I think my most significant accomplishment when looking at my midterm and final project was coming up with a big idea that is meaningful to me. When I first started the class, it was hard for me to adjust to thinking into an artist's mind. All of my work related to me, however with my midterm and final project I was able to dig deeper and think more creatively. It was easier for me to get out of a business set mind frame and portray myself through art. As you can see below, my first quiz captured my love of working out. This is an interest of mine, however it is something that is obvious to me and the people that know me.
As I progressed throughout the quarter, I learned to really get in touch with the artistic side of myself and find meaning to my work. For my midterm project I took the idea of dream and dug deeper on how I could portray what I believe dream to be through a story. I decided not to put pictures that could easily be interpreted by just looking at the image but pictures that had to be analyzed together to figure out the meaning. When comparing the two projects, I am very proud of the improvements I have made from learning to think outside the box and find greater meaning in my midterm project than my magazine cover.
I would also say that my most difficult project was my midterm project. Again, because I found it difficult to come up with the concept and how I was going to display my story. I messed around with different layouts and ideas until I came up with the story of a tree representing life and the sky representing different types of dream catchers. Throughout this project I mastered the selection tool, the opaque tool, and the placement tool. I had to strategically cut pieces of the dream catchers out to make sure it was capturing the right of the picture. I then had to determine the different opaqueness for each picture due to each picture being different brightness levels. From there it was challenging to find the right placement of each picture so that all of my images would fight correctly onto the background. You can see my midterm project below.
Overall I think I have learned how to think outside of the box and become more of an artistic thinker. I think you can see the difference between quiz 1 and my midterm project how I expanded my abilities with photoshop and my big ideas. The most challenging part was probably becoming comfortable with the tools and then applying them to a deeper meaning.
